affinityfan

And what is the benefit in creating more and more recurring "new / young" threads? Is there anything beneficial in them compared to the old ones? - the function is still not implemented, all applications (except Affinity) have had this function for a long time (which is, as I assume, a reason for low priority - the function can be replaced in dozens of different ways), so what's new in this thread?
By the way, a new thread with Autotrace is here every month, so it shouldn't be a problem to continue with these fresh threads - or perhaps yes?
https://www.google.com/search?q=autotrace+site:forum.affinity.serif.com+after:2021-12-01

I do think so indeed - There's a collective clamoring from the customer base stretching back 5+ years for Serif to add what are considered basic tools and features found in other vector programs. Taking 5+ years to implement basic vector tools and features is not a good look for Serif.  Expecting users to go pull up years old threads to add yet another request to the years long list is not realistic. There's no good reason for multi-year long threads all asking for the same thing

Happy New Year!
That's an impressive benchmark score. The reason the combined score is so low, however, is exactly why Apple's M1 chips are so beneficial—since they have UMA (unified memory architecture), there is no penalty when copying data between the CPU and GPU.
The combined score benchmark measures a combination of operations that must be performed on CPU and GPU separately. For example, you may have operations on the CPU (general compositing, vector calculations), then operations on the GPU (raster processing with pixel content). Data has to be copied to and from both devices, which incurs a bandwidth penalty if they are separate rather than unified. That is why you are seeing such a dramatic drop in the combined score: it is factoring in CPU operations, and the memory transfer is clearly quite a bottleneck for the GPU in this instance.
I can give you a practical example using Affinity Photo. Let's say you take an image, then add a few adjustment layers and live filter layers. These will compile kernels that then run on the GPU, so all your compositing is done in 'hardware' and you will see the effect of a faster GPU very clearly.
However, let's say that you then add a vector layer above those layers—for example, a rectangle quick shape, piece of text, or poly curve using the Pen Tool. These vector layers are then going to be processed on the CPU, so the compositing result held in memory must be copied back to the CPU in order to continue compositing. If you then added some more pixel layers, adjustments etc above that vector layer, the compositing data must once again go back to the GPU.
Although it may be less frequent in Photo and Designer, you will continuously run into this scenario with Publisher, since page layout design is the very definition of mixed discipline. At this point, you are at the mercy of whichever component is causing the memory bandwidth bottleneck.
Another advantage of unified memory is that the memory is shared. I do a lot of rendering with blender, 3ds Max and V-Ray etc, and I will often have to render more complex scenes on CPU because they exceed the available VRAM on my GPU (8GB)—especially with V-Ray and archviz scenes. This means I can't take advantage of OptiX rendering on the GPU which is significantly faster. With shared memory, the GPU can just allocate as much memory as it requires rather than having its own discrete pool that you are limited to. I have, on occasion, gone beyond 8GB when compositing in Affinity Photo, so having a shared memory pool of 16/32/64GB is potentially very useful.
A final thing to note: although the M1 scores are technically lower, the increased memory bandwidth as a result of the unified architecture helps everything to 'feel' snappier as well. I now work on an M1 Mac Mini—although the GPU scores around 8000-9000, which seems somewhat pitiful in the face of M1 Pro/Max and the latest discrete GPUs, it still feels incredibly quick with the majority of everyday operations, and all the Affinity apps have some very good optimisation which helps the hardware punch above its technical weight.

Hello. I have repeatedly asked you to add a very important function to the program, but you ignore the requests of real connoisseurs and fans of your programs! But I'll try again ...
Look, I need each line separately, and now I sit and cut this each line, and insert it separately !!! You can't even imagine with what words, in these “happy moments, I remember your developers !!!
CREATE A FUNCTION IN THE CONTEXT MENU "SPLIT TEXT BY LINE" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is it really that hard to do?
With hope and respect.

Please the hotkey needs to be changed! Click + RightMouse is literately not achievable using a tablet. For this feature, I can use toolbar instead but Drag+RightMouse doesn't have an alternative way to access, which means I can not use this feature at all!

I bought Vector Styler using the discount coupon offer but so far I find its UI very difficult to use, mostly because it seems like the author wanted to include access to everything possible in multiple places in its nested menus & windows.

Oh man. It's disheartening to see that this request was made in 2015. I don't mind being versatile and working around the limitations provided, but a Shape Builder tool will save me hours. 

In an ideal world there would be symbol swatches included for things like hatching of various types (lines, wavy lines etc), dots of various densities, soil-type symbols, and so on.
Basically all the things that you would normally fill areas with for plans and drawings of various types. You shouldn't need to create these from scratch in any illustration-type application.
This is basic functionality in my view and it is tragic that it is missing.

Even Powerpoint has pattern fills , sigh

I've probably already done a +1 on this post but here's another for 2020

Let's hope the pattern making capabilities are at the forefront for the devs this coming year. I hate to admit that the AI for iPad has some nifty ways of making them and also a very intuitive radial repeat function.

I miss the pattern tool in Illustrator. +1

I am certainly interested to see what progress Designer makes in future updates. In my opinion, Photo and Publisher have a lot more developed and seem to be more of a primary focus. And of course, I can understand that the suite as a whole can get piled up with other priorities. I get it. Just saying that as a lover of the first Affinity application, I can agree with the points in the original post, and I look forward to any unexpected surprises.

i cosigned. at first hesitate to move out from adobe ecosystem since Affinity looks promising. But if they didnt add up any requested features, I guess I need to reconsider everything.

For me Support for RTL - Affinity needs a major rethink on this is very important esp with Publisher/Designer. I have moved heaven and earth to continue my project with publisher and despite all the hoo-ha affinity has avoided this hotly debated topic and continues to do so....

Wow the coupon discount site thingy is legit, everyone who needs a pure vector workflow needs to grab VectorStyler now
 
I'd recommend opening in Designer then copy pasting into VectorStyler for advanced warping and wot not, well that's the way I'm using it, kind of like a plug-in for all the missing basics, copy pasting back into Affinity for layout (I use Pub StudioLink 95% of the time) 

To Serif team.
May we please know, in the end of 2021, why canvas rendering algorithms are still so terrible in all Affinity apps? 
It's just not pleasant to see at all. Lots of glitches, fps drops, screen tearing, jumping objects and visible tiling/blocky artefacts during any changes being made.
While searching here on forums, I found lots of topics covering all these issues.
 Some of them are five or six years old. But some of these topics are much more recent. Various configurations, pretty good CPUs and GPUs of all sorts.
 But same screen tearing, artefacts and visible tiles. For a such long period of time. And there are still no fixes for that.
In some of those topics I've found official responses, that "this is done by design", "it's the way our apps render the canvas".
 Well, it's not a good design then. And certainly not a good way to render the canvas.
How you, at Serif, find it acceptable? Are you ok with seeing canvas rendering like that in your apps? How it passes QA and being shipped to your customers?
Why there are headlines on Affinity website: "fast and glorious", "pan and zoom at 60fps", "handle 1000s of objects with no lag", "optimized for documents of any complexity"? When it is simply not true, but rather false statements. At least it is not true as long, as such core performance problems still persist for so many people, including myself.
Why not consider implementing something like v-sync in your canvas rendering pipeline? Or something else that will prevent visible artefacts appearing during canvas updates. So it will wait for all the tiles to finish calculating their image data and then the whole visible part of the canvas will be composited and painted in a single (at least on the visible to user level) draw event.
It will significantly reduce overall performance? Well, maybe, but then you'll need to find a solution for this as well.
 Now it looks like the best idea for you was to throw all these tiles at your customer's screen as fast as possible. Because who notice that mess? They'll be fine with that.
But I do notice that. And I want to avoid any screen tearing and tile artefacts in my experience with apps even on the most basic and simple tasks.
So, where is mine "smooth and glorious 60fps experience"? I'm not even starting doing any serious graphic design work because I don't like your canvas in its current state. Sorry.
Second, why mouse polling rate plays such significant role in your apps canvas performance? Recently I discovered this myself, and it was confirmed with your team members, that reducing mouse polling rate to default 125Hz significantly improves screen canvas performance. Significantly, but still not perfect yet.
So why not restrict any user input events and sync them with dispay refresh rate / gpu redraw cycle?
Just an example. The latest Safari has new option in their Debug menu: "Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60fps". It ignores the display's refresh rate and throttle all in-window paint events down to commonly safe and achievable 60fps. So why not consider something like this and limit overall fps and user input event processing for the sake of overall performance improvement? Maybe then we'll get a better canvas?
My main question is: is it an absolutely impossible to seamlessly refresh the canvas without all these tiles flickering around constantly once anything is changed in the viewport? I'm just wondering why it is still being considered as normal in Affinity apps to have a canvas behaving this way?
Sorry if my post seems to be a rant or offended you in some way. I had no intent of doing that. 
I'm really wondering if Affinity suite can be made better for all of us. Or we shouldn't expect anything better being done in this direction.
Maybe it's really a one big "pain in the a.s" problem for any software developers to make CPU and GPU properly talk to each other? 
Maybe there are lots of problems with major OS developers ditching OpenGL and moving towards Metal/DirectX?
Also, we've seen this recent Apple's movement from separate CPU and GPU with dedicated memory to SoC solutions with unified, shared memory.
 Yes, I can understand that your apps should greatly benefit from that. Obviously, lower latencies, less memory copy operations, overall faster access to data.
 All things being done in one place. But...
But at the same time I feel that it's just wrong to keep telling anyone on Twitter how good and fast your apps perform on those recent Apple SoCs, while its canvas (which is the main working and the most important area) lags and glitches in general for anyone with more traditional system configuration, even on the most simple scenarios like moving an artboard or a single layer around.
I couldn't be the one who notices that. And my system is pretty powerful and it's clear that it deserves better performance and smoother visual response. What I see now is simply unacceptable for me.
To be completely honest, I must say that I love your apps. Overall, they are much, much better for me than anything I've seen in this field. There are so many great features and innovative decisions, little details, that make it truly great.
 Every time I discovered these in your apps I was so excited and happy, because I remembered how bad the same thing was in Adobe's products.
I remember lots of annoying, terrible things that made me leave Adobe's universe once and forever.
 Vast majority of these things remain unchanged for many years. Because they don't care about their software and customers at all.
I found your company and your products to be a complete opposite. Small and passionated company with people really interested in their products. 
I don't want to be disappointed with you guys. I believe in you. I believe in Serif.
Just can't stand this canvas tiles flickering and tearing.
Sorry.

Hi Aleksandr Novakov,

This is something we're aware of and is with development to be fixed. Unfortunately its a side effect if introducing the ability to delete curve segments by holding down Ctrl whilst in the Node Tool.

On Windows this conflicts with the key to temporarily switch to the Node Tool whilst in the Pen Tool.

In the previous versions of Designer it was possible to add nodes on curves on the fly while drawing with the pen tool, by pressing ctrl and hence temporarly converting the pen tool to the nodes tool.
Currently (1.9) pressing ctrl while drawing curves with the pen tool temporarly activates the nodes tool but with the function to delete portions (small X icon close to the cursor), even if in the bottom bar it says that clicking one should be able to add nodes.
Please go back to the previous behaviour, thanks.

That's the beauty of it - I needed to distort a logo and text around a circle for a LP label and first tried the Arc tool in VectorStyler which was pretty ropey looking, so went on the VS forum to query the problem and within a few minutes I was recommended the text on a path tool which I initially thought wouldn't get the results I was after, but had a mess about and found a bend setting that distorts around the path, with lots of settings which helped me achieve what my idea, the end result is really accurate and would be near impossible (unless you want to spend an age) to do in Affinity, all just copy pasted between Affinity Pub and VS and even retaining exact CMYK percentages   


Screen Grab 2021-10-14 at 14.12.13.mov

I don't think anyone was expecting we'd be waiting close to a decade to get standard features in Affinity Designer. Illustrator and Corel for example, have had pretty solid complete vector apps going back even further and it was easy to get spoiled with that. We didn't always know the tools we would soon "need" until they were released in an annual update. Today we/Affinity have the benefit of hindsight and seeing what tools worked best and what were simply "shiny trinkets" Adobe added to sell more upgrades.

I've been an Affinity fan since around 2015 and have always seen the potential and hoped for it to be the answer for those unwilling to overpay with a subscription for bloated Adobe software. Much like a car without gauges installed still functions as a car, Affinity has "functioned" as a vector app for so many years in this way and has seemed more interested in the "paint job" (account registration to share assets across multiple devices, ability to zoom in and edit 10,000 layers without lag, etc) than making sure it has the basic necessities first. I have high hopes that between 1.10 and 2.0, however many iterations there end up being, that we get those essentials - the things all of us have been endlessly clamoring for - text warp, vector eraser, vector trace, blog brush equivalent, 100% vector brushes, smooth tool, vector symmetry to name a few. I am wondering if many of these are already being developed behind the scenes in anticipation for a big 2.0 rollout. I'm hoping the speed and efficiency updates of the most recent update were done in preparation for 2.0 and all the tools requested. 

Using Vectorstyler over the last two years has really opened my eyes to what a powerful vector app can do. The sheer number of options, controls, tools and customization of the app may scare novices but will amaze veteran vector designers. The more I've used it for professional work, the more options and customized workflows I can create - the higher the bar of expectations for a professional vector app have gone. It needs more work and polishing to be sure - but the groundwork already laid has made me rethink my vector workflow and temper my expectations for Designer. I don't ever see Designer being on the same level of Vectorstyler in terms of sheer vector power. Rather, Designer is becoming the vector app that compliments it's Publisher and Photo siblings - the niche of Affinity is the trinity that can/will soon do what a majority of typical users want. Vectorstyler to me, is not competition or an "either-or" choice but an additional tool for those who need more power and options for their vector work.

I don't anticipate Affinity will ever get Designer to the level Vectorstyler is at in terms of sheer vector control and tools - I don't think that is their goal. Equally, I don't see Vectorstyler getting into a pixel persona or building a complimentary raster app and publisher app. Just as I use specialized apps for my vector tracing (Vector Magic) and my halftone vectors (Vectoraster), I can see specific uses for Designer and still other uses for Vectorstyler to help me achieve my ideal workflow. 
Because of Vectorstyler, I'm more at peace with the snail-speed update pace of Affinity. I'm still bothered some that things have taken this long - but it's no longer forcing me to cling to my copy of Adobe CS6
Just my thoughts

is affinity designer will add shape builder tool in the next update ?, I love affinity alot, but have no that tool force me to buy adobe illustrator.

And on/off "Transform Mode" please

Hi @kazu san,
As R C-R has confirmed, unfortunately this isn't an available function of the Affinity app currently, my apologies.
I'll be sure to move this thread to the Feedback section of our forums, for our devs to see and consider adding in a future version, I hope this helps!

One thing I love about Affinity Designer is that the 3D effect and the Bevel/Emboss effect do not rotate when the shape itself is rotated. Regardless of the orientation of the object, they follow the orientation they are set to. The gradient effects, on the other hand, do not exhibit the same behavior. Is there a way to lock them so that they do not rotate? Or, is there a way to lock the regular object fill gradient so that it doesn't rotate with a shape? I know a work around is to place an object with a gradient inside of the object and lock the children but this is not effective with my use case where I need to make multiple copies of the same object and rotate it while keeping the gradient consistent. If I don't use a gradient, I can convert an object into a Symbol and duplicate it and place it in multiple areas in my project with different rotations. Without being able to lock the gradient or having to adjust each one individually it becomes very tedious.